“In my eyes,” Erhard confided in January 1962, “power is always dull, it is dangerous, it is brutal and ultimately even dumb.”
By every measure, Germany was a disaster in 1945—defeated, devastated, divided, and demoralized—and not only because of the war. The Nazis, of course, were socialist (the name derives from National Socialist German Workers Party), so for more than a decade the German economy had been “planned” from the top. It was tormented with price controls, rationing, bureaucracy, inflation, cronyism, cartels, misdirection of resources, and government command of important industries. Producers made what the planners ordered them to. Service to the state was the highest value.
Ludwig Erhard reversed those practices, and in doing so he gave birth to a miraculous economic recovery.
"Erhard's legacy was forged in the decade and a half after the war’s end. He forever answered the question 'What do you do with an economy in ...
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